We are at the birth of BBC1's not-the-Nine O'Clock News schedules, and the very first effect is to change the station's Sunday nights into a documentary zone. After the first of the sabbath's new regular 10pm news bulletins came the shamelessly sidelined Panorama, whose success this month in naming the Omagh bombing suspects could not go unpunished. On the still-awake side of the Ten came the first episode of Prof Robert Winston's new medical blockbuster, Superhuman, into which an extra episode of Casualty craftily bled thematically. Against it, ITV fielded a Ross Kemp cop show, Without Motive, moved in extremis from Mondays. I hope the BBC won this first battle in the new ratings war not just because poor Panorama stood to inherit the spoils of a Robert Winston victory, but because Superhuman was more creative, more innovative, more carefully made and, actually, more dramatic than anything television's drama departments have come up with lately.
Whether Superhuman was more worthwhile, in any higher sense, is another matter. The impression it left was of breathless gee-whizzery. This was a programme so full of itself that it spent its first five minutes telling us what was in store over the next six weeks. The come-on soundbites were outrageously emotive. An old boy awaiting a heart transplant said he felt he was pointing a gun at somebody just so he could live. A tearful mother wept as she said of her toddler son: "If it does happen he'll be able to hear, but he's not going to be able to smile."
Next week's come-ons culminate with the wonderfully Brass Eye-sounding "and strangest of all, see how brain cells from a pig enabled this man to walk again . . . " ("and why", as Reginald Bosanquet might have said, "Donny the Donkey is celebrating three A-level passes . . . "). These tasteless tasters follow the most elaborate title sequence on television, in which a giant naked body is stretched out over a light-box in a Dome-like interior, and fussed over by a Lilliputian army of technicians who make the repairers of Lee Majors's Six Million Dollar Man look like Sunday DIYers. Discreet prop placement makes the sex of this Gulliver indeterminate but, at least, it was not Lord Winston's body, as it so easily could have been. The BBC has long since become fascinated by this avuncular icon's bodily functions. In his previous series, The Human Body, he peered down a microscope at one of his own ejaculations. In this series, he has so far restricted the intimacy to having the camera follow a pill's progress past his moustache and into his stomach, and to standing in his boxer shorts in an igloo to make a point about body temperature.
Episode one began in grandiose style, with Winston standing on a giant dam. This was ostensibly a metaphor for man's desire to tame nature rather than for the profligacy of television, but to justify the airtime, the dam returned to illustrate his line: "A blood clot is a dam". Clever stuff, but the special effects were even cleverer. A little girl morphed into her grandmother; to illustrate G-force, a car fell down the side of a building bonnet first. Sometimes the simpler images were no less eloquent.
Once you were in pieces after an accident, Winston said, medical aid was a matter of making a series of separate decisions against the clock, each with consequences: he was shown looking clever and playing a game of speed chess. But the real strength of the series is not the visual effects, or even Winston, one of the great tele-hams, but the stories it tells, those five-minute narratives of extraordinary recovery. The next episode, which I have also seen, features a profoundly deaf little boy. Born without a working cochlea, he needs an electronic implant. The problem is that the surgery risks cutting his facial nerve, causing the "horrible deformity" of paralysis. I won't tell you the outcome, but I will say it jerked tears from me. Desmond Wilcox would have been proud.
To be fair, the professor's enthusiasm does not mean that he claims all these surgical breakthroughs are miracles. Having shown us two men with dead men's arms sewn on to their stumps, he concludes next week that, at the moment, the vagaries of the operation outweigh its advantages. Nevertheless, there is more than a hint of Ripley's Believe It or Not! - I wouldn't like to say freak show - about Superhuman.
The programme is co-produced by the Learning Channel. To put it politely, however, Superhuman wears its learning lightly. By the end of part one, the only new things I had gleaned were that internal bleeding is best not treated by blood transfusion, and that keeping bodies cold can help recovery. The greater principle these points illustrated was that Hippocrates got it right when he told his disciples to listen to what the body was telling them. But the real lesson I learnt was that, on a Sunday night, nothing beats a good story well told - and that medicine has some of the greatest stories of all.
Andrew Billen writes for the London Evening Standard
